Marble Composition

Nuclear Proliferation

Via the indespensible blog over at the American Prospect, TAPPED, we have a couple of posts on the subject at hand. First we hear from Matt Yglesias:

NORTH KOREA'S NUKES. Daniel McKivergan wrote the other day that the Clinton administration "rewarded North Korea . . . by letting that government keeps its nuclear weapons." In response I noted that since North Korea didn't have any nuclear weapons at that time, it could hardly have kept them. McKivergan strikes back with an update to his post:

On October 20, 2002, the New York Times reported: "Several years ago the Central Intelligence Agency estimated that North Korea already had reprocessed enough plutonium at Yongbyon to make one or 2 nuclear weapons, and that the fuel in storage could be fabricated into 5 or 10 more." There are many other similar examples.

Let's back this up. I have enough money to buy a Mac Mini. I don't have a Mac Mini. I have the ingredients in my fridge to make a Greek omelet. I don't have a Greek omelet. The gas station a couple blocks from my house contains enough gasoline to make a lot of napalm bombs, but it doesn't contain any napalm. The government of Japan has the technical know-how to build a nuclear bomb, but it doesn't have any nuclear bombs. My computer has the capacity to run Microsoft Word, but the program isn't installed.

With that said, North Korea, while Bill Clinton was president, had enough plutonium to build nuclear weapons. It did not, however, have nuclear weapons. Why not? None were built. Why not? Clinton's deal. What went wrong? Bush:

But the North Koreans had another route to nuclear weapons--a stash of radioactive fuel rods, taken a decade earlier from its nuclear power plant in Yongbyon. These rods could be processed into plutonium--and, from that, into A-bombs--not in years but in months. Thanks to an agreement brokered by the Clinton administration, the rods were locked in a storage facility under the monitoring of international weapons-inspectors. Common sense dictated that--whatever it did about the centrifuges--the Bush administration should do everything possible to keep the fuel rods locked up.

But instead of "everything possible" the Bush administration . . . invaded Iraq while ignoring the situation.

And then from Mark Leon Goldberg:

DEFINING “LEGITIMATE” DOWN. Here's a novel experiment in logic and reasoning: At a meeting of the World Jewish Congress yesterday, John Bolton told the audience that India and Pakistan’s acquisition of their nuclear of nuclear weapons was “legitimate,” precisely because they are not parties to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. As Irwin Arieff of Reuters reports:

"I give them (India and Pakistan) credit at least that what they did was consistent with the obligations they undertook," Bolton said. "They never pretended that they had given up the pursuit of nuclear weapons. They never tried to tie what they were doing under a cloak of international legitimacy. They did it openly and they did it legitimately."

If you are shocked by this statement you are not alone. No one in the administration has summoned this argument before. And it was nowhere to be found among the reasons President Bush cited in his de facto recognition of India's nuclear program yesterday.

So this morning, perhaps in anticipation of a tongue-lashing from his boss in Foggy Bottom, Bolton channeled his inner lawyer this morning and tried to clear things up. (Via email from a reporter on the scene.)

“What I said last night was in the context of the NPT, that India and Pakistan had never signed the nonprolfieration treaty and therefore they weren't in violation of it by having nuclear programs, in contrast with Iran that is a state-party to the non proliferation treaty and that is violating its obligations."

Problem is, by Bolton's logic, A.Q. Khan’s proliferation of nuclear technology to Iran and elsewhere can be considered legitimate as well. After all, if Pakistan is not party to the NPT, they are free to sell nuclear technology to whomever they desire; the sole international obligation lies at the feat of NPT countries not to buy the technology.

This is a generous reading of international law, but one we can expect to find from a man who considers such law to be fiction.

John Bolton tried to scuttle any plans to round up Russia's loose nukes when he worked at the State Department during Bush's first term, and this is just more of the same. Anytime you hear an administration flak saying they're concerned about nuclear material ending up in the hands of Islamic extremists, don't buy it. Behind the scenes, and certainly out of the spotlight, they're actively working to trash the kinds of policies and initiatives that would tighten control of the world's supply of nuclear goodies.

And, it's not like we all weren't warned. This from the intro of the Hart-Rudman Commission's report from September 15, 1999:

Weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, and biological) and weapons of mass disruption (information warfare) will continue to proliferate to a wider range of state and non-state actors. Maintenance of a robust nuclear deterrent therefore remains essential as well as investment in new forms of defense against these threats.

A really simple question comes to mind: why? Why allow more nuclear material to traverse the globe? I'm no conspiracy theorist, but aren't the only plausible answers that they don't care, or that ratcheting things up works to their political advantage? Maybe they're mentaly locked into a worldview that is so adversarial to international cooperation that they can't see how working with other countries might benefit us here at home? I'm mystified.

And, isn't it funny how Bush and his supporters stomp around like they're the big tough guys, the only ones with the "seriousness" to deal with national security, and they go and attack one of the weakest states in the Middle East while the real threats remain unengaged and largely ignored? Fucking idiots. Up really is down these days.

posted by FuzzFinger @ 3/03/2006 06:31:00 PM